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EPFL Researchers Invent Low-Cost Alternative to Bitcoin:
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is limited by its astronomical electricity consumption and outsized carbon footprint. A nearly zero-energy alternative sounds too good to be true, but as School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) Professor Rachid Guerraoui explains, it all comes down to our understanding of what makes transactions secure.
To explain why the system developed in his Distributed Computing Lab (DCL) represents a paradigm shift in how we think about cryptocurrencies -- and about digital trust in general -- Professor Rachid Guerraoui uses a legal metaphor: all players in this new system are "innocent until proven guilty."
This is in contrast to the traditional Bitcoin model first described in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, which relies on solving a difficult problem called "consensus" to guarantee the security of transactions. In this model, everyone in a distributed system must agree on the validity of all transactions to prevent malicious players from cheating -- for example, by spending the same digital tokens twice (double-spending). In order to prove their honesty and achieve consensus, players must execute complex -- and energy-intensive -- computing tasks that are then verified by the other players.
But in their new system, Guerraoui and his colleagues flip the assumption that all players are potential cheaters on its head.
What do you guys think? Will this replace Bitcoin?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 30 2019, @10:43PM (4 children)
... around the same time you can buy unicorn burgers at MacDonalds.
This stupid researcher assumes that people can be trusted. Within 30 minutes of this, currency's launch, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will own all the coins and this dingbat researcher will be sent to Guatanamo Bay.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Monday September 30 2019, @10:47PM
I've invented an even lower-cost alternative to Bitcoin. I'll post details of the ICO as soon as I can set up a funding web site for it, and y'all can donate^H^H^Hinvest in it.
PS: This is not a scam!
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 01 2019, @04:25AM
Actually, I have an even simpler scheme that doesn't even need a computer. I call it braincoins, because it can all be done in your brain.
It works as follows: If you want to buy something that, for example, costs 30 braincoins, I just tell the seller: "I'm giving you thirty braincoins" and remember that I now have 30 braincoins less. The seller in turn remembers that he has30 braincoins more.
Of course this relies on the seller to trust me that I really have those braincoins. Although, thinking again, he doesn't really have to, as he'll increase his amount of braincoins anyway. So in the end this indeed is a zero-trust scheme!
Even better, you can simply omit any talk about money transfer; all you need is that both parties know about the amount. So the whole buying process can be as simple as:
Buyer: "How much does this cost?"
Seller: "30 Braincoins."
Buyer: "Great, I'll buy it."
Seller gives buyer the item.
That's even easier than traditional cash! And certainly more anonymous than anything the cryptocurrency people have ever invented!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 01 2019, @02:29PM
A more gooder idea: An executive order declaring that tree leaves are the new legal tender. They are self growing, saving lots of ink and paper. What could go wrong?
McUnicorn burgers better be free range unicorns.
Also apologies to Douglas Adams.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 01 2019, @03:38PM
I think an example can illustrate how this happens.
Joe 1 is trusted by everyone. He double pays on large payments and disappears. While some of the goods and services can be recovered, some can't. So Joe 1 has benefited by the trades and now can't be punished by the collective market.
A few days later, Joe 2 appears. He's trusted by everyone...
As long as defection is punished more than its gains, you can have a viable system based on initial trust. But with money, because of how fluid it is and how easy it is to enter and leave such markets, one can easily find scams that break this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 30 2019, @10:45PM (18 children)
I'll plug it again:
Assign Onward, described over a year ago, tells a story of how blockchain (without proof of work) can be used as a virtual currency:
http://mangocats.com/ao/ [mangocats.com]
The trick is: people who care about the contents of the blockchain need to monitor it. There are myriad ways to do this, one idea is to incentivize "auditors" to find mistakes in the chain for shares of the value of the mistakes they find.
Copying one massive blockchain to all people on the planet, and piling proof of work on top of that - yeah, insanely unsustainable. Plenty of people have put plenty of hot air behind plenty of alternatives.
May the simplest secure solution prevail.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday September 30 2019, @11:16PM (17 children)
Simplest secure solution is stable government backed cash.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 30 2019, @11:27PM (13 children)
How is the USD "secure"?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday September 30 2019, @11:44PM (9 children)
How is it not?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 01 2019, @12:05AM (7 children)
"It's a trap."
Will fall when the Saudi/petrodollars fall (in general, when the dependency on fossil fuels of the entire world goes low enough).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 01 2019, @12:25AM (6 children)
You might be right, but I think we will have more serious things to worry about when the oil runs out.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 01 2019, @01:19AM (5 children)
Maybe a naive one, but I hold the hope we can get weaned on dino-juice/-farts before they run out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 01 2019, @01:56AM (4 children)
I have every confidence we can, but what worries me is the people who have become fabulously wealthy from oil will react poorly to losing their power and influence and violence will ensue.
Can you imagine (for example) anyone wanting to socialise with a Saudi sheik if they have no oil to sell?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @02:36AM
Yes, I can imagine the Saudi sheik learns to code and sells the next worthless social app for billions, becoming even more fabulously wealthy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday October 01 2019, @04:23AM (2 children)
Well, looking to Iran (10% of world oil reserves) and Venezuela (largest in the world [soylentnews.org]), the "someone has interest to control the oil supplies/oil trading currency" seems like a plausible assumption.
Especially knowing what happened with the with the last guy attempting to sell oil in a different currency [globalresearch.ca].
I have this nagging feeling that if the oil is no longer sold only in a certain currency, the myth of "limitless and perpetual deficit, feds can print money anytime" may fall into pieces. And those time may not be very far [wsj.com], especially if China feels bullied enough by tariff wars to give international sanctions [reuters.com] a miss and go ahead with its belt-and-road until they reach the Iran oil by land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 01 2019, @07:28PM (1 child)
I had not thought of any of that.
I wonder what would happen if the US tried to prevent China from reaching Iran by road and rail?
I cannot see that ending well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday October 02 2019, @12:34AM
That would be an aggression war US can't economically/socially sustain.
Given that India - US relationship is not quite cozy [wikipedia.org] (understandable, as US sided with Pakistan most of the time), that would be the two most populous countries on Earth which wouldn't enjoy the adventurism.
Incidentally, the two countries that act as a destination for most of the common goods the US outsourced their industry (trade deficit combined with the two countries [wikipedia.org]: $367B which is over 50% of US trade deficit with the entire world). An abrupt break in the trade caused by a war will immediately reflect in increased prices in US and a lack of those goods on the market. With an economy switching to war conditions, there's little chance the US economy will be able to replace those on a horizon of some 5 years or so.
Then, looking on the geography, China is in a better position to cut the trade routes with South Korea and Japan than US is able to maintain them. One on top of the other, tell the US population they aren't gonna have their next-gen electronic gadgets or washing machines before the embedded planned obsolescence kicks in and you'll see how likely is the US population to support the war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 01 2019, @02:30PM
Depends on the full faith and credit of the US. And the US keeps track of virtually all money transactions (by dollar amount) that aren't cash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @12:37AM (1 child)
He said government backed. The USD is owned by the the federal reserve, which despite its name, is a privately-owned company.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday October 01 2019, @03:00PM
FTFY. Ownership hasn't changed.
Much of the operations of the Federal Reserve has been delegated to private banks and such. They can be replaced either by Congress writing new law or by someone with a better lobbying effort. Temporary control is not ownership.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 01 2019, @02:32PM
Secure it with Wombat Cubes of highest quality.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @12:40AM
lmao. fuck your jew slave money.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 01 2019, @01:58AM (1 child)
It's simple in the way that "that's how we've always done it" is simple.
It's secure in the way that the U.S. Secret Service has always (ineffectively) thwarted counterfeiters and various other fraudsters. You mention cash, cash can be strong-arm stolen. Serious room for improvement there.
It's stable like the government that backs it... some better than others.
And, cash is convenient like carrying gold bullion - not at all, particularly in a global networked economy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 01 2019, @06:54AM
Unless you mean that it's hard finding denominations worth much less than $50, not at all. I can walk around with a several hundred dollars worth of bullion kept safe in a wallet the size of a USB key. And if you did think that it's hard finding denominations much less than $50, you're doing cash wrong.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Monday September 30 2019, @10:52PM (2 children)
Nobody could be innocent enough to think that there wouldn't be cheating if it were easy in essentially anonymous financial transactions, so that summary has got to be wrong. It's essentially a quote from the first part of the article, but that was wrong, too.
IIUC this system is more like each participant voting about whether any particular transaction is trustworthy. I can see applications for that kind of system, but they aren't financial. So I'm assuming that I'd need to dig deeper if I wanted to see any actual rationale. But the second half of the article sounds as if the system would have certain uses, where the first two paragraphs make it seem totally foolish.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday October 01 2019, @01:02AM
I could see this working for microtransactions, if the expected cost of the miner fee attached to a transaction outweighs the risk of a doublespend. If the gamble is $0.50, it could make sense. If it's $50,000... nope, gimme that sweet Earth-destroying PoW!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday October 01 2019, @03:28AM
The web site looks like someone is trolling for grant money and potential suckers^winvestors. It's the current economic model - you don't need a reasonable expectation that something will work, just people greedy enough to want to believe. And cryptocurrency, by its nature, attracts people who really, really want to believe.
Even bullets will be a more stable currency than cryptocurrency. And I'm saying that as someone who is in favour of gun control laws.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday September 30 2019, @10:59PM (26 children)
bitcoin scaled beyond most people's expectations.
But it has limits [wikipedia.org]
Eventually, something will hav to replace it.
Alas, there isn't enough trust to go around.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 01 2019, @02:04AM (16 children)
Trusting in proof of work is a fool's game. Trust in people and processes you can monitor, transparently, not in some faith that the majority of greedy people control the majority of the network compute energy wastage - particularly if you're playing in alt-coins.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01 2019, @04:02AM
In general, you cannot monitor people and processes even within your own home. Even when the only people in there is you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 01 2019, @03:16PM (14 children)
Proof of work is such monitoring. And it's far better than what we have in most currencies.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 01 2019, @04:54PM (13 children)
Proof of work assumes that no bad actor is going to field more than 50% of the total "hashing power" for the period of the update cycle. Exploits of this have happened, many times now, resulting in significant value transfer to bad actors.
It may be hard to do in the "big bad bitcoin" because it holds so much of the market's attention, for now, but that very feature is what makes the bitcoin blockchain and proof of work unsustainable - it will not scale to billions of users with daily transactions, not without free energy, and even with free energy you're looking at spending more energy on the hash computations for everyone's morning coffee run than the sum total of all present energy expenditures worldwide.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/4/20682109/bitcoin-energy-consumption-annual-calculation-cambridge-index-cbeci-country-comparison [theverge.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 02 2019, @02:17AM (12 children)
And what's your process in regular currencies that works if more than 50% of the people involved comply? For example, what's going to happen to the US dollar, if say, 10% are counterfeiting it?`
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 02 2019, @02:35AM (11 children)
A. how do you know it's not already more than that today? (you don't.)
B. The US dollar is protected by the secret service, and various agencies up to and including all armed services - it's far from perfect, but it's a system that has worked as well as any other, and better than most, for the past two centuries.
C. When bitcoin and friends get "stolen" I see little, if any, concern from law enforcement. Can you say the same for bank robberies?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 02 2019, @03:51AM (10 children)
Because there'd be a vast number of crappy bills out there, if there were. 10% don't have the specialized materials, tools, or skills. But perhaps by your question, you're implying that there's an evil deity out there who has created a large population of counterfeiters who are both perfect and not particularly ambitious?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:12PM (9 children)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/04/there-are-more-bills-circulation-than-bills-it-makes-no-cents/ [washingtonpost.com]
There's a huge overseas US paper money economy, and it gets little oversight from the Secret Service and little mixing with domestic daily paper money transactions.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 03 2019, @08:57PM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 03 2019, @09:45PM (7 children)
Can they, all? Do they, always?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/11/22/they-make-fake-money-worth-more-than-cocaine-the-u-s-just-recovered-30-million-of-it/ [washingtonpost.com]
The Secret Service, which has a strong motivation to not publicly overestimate how poorly they are actually doing their job. The article states that the bulk of the Peruvian counterfeits are shipped straight to the U.S. - which seems... unlikely that there wouldn't be overseas customers for their products, particularly considering that most U.S. cash is held outside the U.S.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/rptcongress/counterfeit/default.htm#toc02 [federalreserve.gov]
The party line is:
and recent Google searches fail, entirely, to find articles I was reading 10-15 years ago stating concerns about much higher overseas counterfeit rates. On the face of it, it seems unlikely to me that overseas circulation of large quantities of US currency between individual parties, with a relatively low exchange rate between parties would be subject to the same high levels of counterfeit detection as domestically circulated cash which cycles through U.S. stores and banks much more quickly.
Maybe the older articles were unfounded scare mongering by some faction or another, maybe not. They were being published while the US currency printing was using out of date tech, one of the easiest to counterfeit in the world. The fact that the articles stating higher counterfeit rates are no longer easily found is... interesting.
Here's one off-hand reference to Columbia printing "Billions" in counterfeits... credibility of a former counterfeiter vs credibility of the U.S. Secret Service official reports... tough call:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4867635 [npr.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 04 2019, @11:28AM (6 children)
And? Let us review the situation. You kicked off your position in this thread by claiming
Now, it appears that there's at least 60% of the world dollar market that nobody, most particularly you, is monitoring. So why again are we supposed to be concerned about the 50+% computing exploit when you are strongly implying that there's even bigger exploits by far smaller groups in the US dollar which you apparently have more confidence in.
The handwaving that there could, might, possibly be a huge amount of counterfeiting of the US dollar is just icing on the cake. For all the hubbub, no one has yet figured out how to counterfeit Bitcoins, even with the 50+% exploit.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 04 2019, @03:08PM (5 children)
The Secret Service does, in fact, monitor overseas use of US currency, even where they lack jurisdiction. Do I believe that they achieve the 1:10,000 counterfeit to genuine bill ration they claim - maybe domestically where it can be somewhat independently verified, but not at all internationally.
Bigger exploits, because the actual circulating value of US dollars - being exchanged for actual goods and services - exceeds BTC by several orders of magnitude?
My "problem" with proof of work isn't so much that it is exploitable, and has been verifiably exploited for millions of dollars in "coin value" multiple times, the problem is the absolutely massive quantity of energy that is being expended to attempt to maintain this imperfect, and unscalable, system.
For all your hubbub, the 50+% exploit is counterfeiting of (any) proof of work coin, and like all counterfeiting it works until it is detected. With "lightning fast" transactions, the counterfeit blockchains have been able to convince others to give them massive amounts of value before they are detected.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 05 2019, @02:44AM (4 children)
What is the point of your disbelief here? You dropped a bunch of links for some reason.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 06 2019, @09:09PM (3 children)
If you sniff around enough the press would seem to contradict itself - frequently. Secret Service states 60% of all counterfeit currency comes from country X, 30% from country Y in another story, 20% from country Z in a third - oh, wait, maybe it shifts over time... well, does it shift enough to also account for 40% coming from country W? They do stick pretty steadfast to the 1/10,000 bill story domestically and overseas - but maybe that's true with the $20 being the most commonly counterfeited domestically and the $100 internationally? More likely it's just an easy soundbite to train everyone to for chance interactions with the press.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 07 2019, @03:19AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 07 2019, @12:08PM (1 child)
Can "we"? Any examples of better than 50% "security" in practice yet? It's been 10 years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 07 2019, @01:13PM
Much of the problem is selective communication, such as in the Byzantine generals [microsoft.com] problem where N generals decide by consensus whether to attack or retreat, but traitors can selectively lie, so that some receive a concensus of attack and some retreat (the idea being that a mixture of some parties attacking and some retreating are worse). The linked paper describes an optimal solution for the basic problem which allows for successful decision making even when there's m traitors among 3m+1 generals. So more than 2/3 of generals need to be honest in order for this particular scheme to work.
Now, suppose those generals then report all the communications they receive with incontrovertible evidence that the messages are correct (say a one-time hash signature that can only be generated by a secret held by the general generating the message), then suddenly the game changes. Any general who has submitted two different messages (which would have to be correctly signed in the first place or they would be rejected) to two honest generals (the only situation where such treachery would be at all useful), is now outed as a traitor. It doesn't matter what sort of games the traitor generals play at that point - they can only expose more traitors, they can't hide traitors nor falsely convict honest generals.
In practice, this is computationally hard since every communication step then becomes the square of the number of participants in the market which is why it's not done presently. But you can do more such checking than present to increase the threshold needed for such "byzantine faults" [wikipedia.org] of deception to succeed.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday October 01 2019, @03:36AM (8 children)
Just look at how many barrels of oil or dollars you could get for just one working nuke.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday October 01 2019, @07:45AM (1 child)
Who gets to decide on how a bullet is delivered?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 01 2019, @09:32AM
> Who gets to decide on how a bullet is delivered?
I would guess whoever is currently operating the bullet delivery system?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 01 2019, @02:37PM (5 children)
Money is intentionally scarce. Bullets OTOH are easy to manufacture. It wouldn't take long till we'd be looking for the next next currency due to the rampant inflation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday October 01 2019, @05:47PM (4 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 02 2019, @02:14AM (3 children)
For the US government, not for you.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 06 2019, @01:30PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 07 2019, @03:24AM (1 child)
The US government is the government in question. And despite the breezy assurances to the contrary they retain ultimate control over both the US dollar currency and the derived classes of securities considered to near equivalent.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday October 07 2019, @10:42PM
The government also has no effective control over the value of stocks or if money, or companies would never go bust (angers voters who are shareholders or employees) and commodities would have fixed prices in relation to the currency. That's just reality.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday October 01 2019, @07:53AM (1 child)
An alternative to X that does a radically different thing and achieves a different objective is not an alternative.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday October 01 2019, @06:15PM
It's not that oil is scarce - Venezuela has loads of it. They just wrecked their economy to the point that they can no longer dependably produce it in quantity, so they have to exchange what little they can produce for things like oil byproducts, such as the dilutants they need to keep their oilfields pumping. Scarcity of oil doesn't enter into it - broken refineries and broke state oil company is all it took.
Cryptocurrency is just another form of fiat currency, one more step removed from reality than traditional fiat currency, which is removed from the reality of gold and silver., which only have value if you have a use for them - otherwise they too are just another form of fiat currency.
On the practical side, bullets are already a means of exchange and acquiring wealth. Like every time someone points a gun and says "your money/car/bling for your life." Perhaps, if the US won't pass meaningful arms regulation, the solution that will arise from the current situation tending to its ultimate resolution will be arming everyone, mutually assured destruction, and vast depopulation as everyone shoots everyone else in an endless loop of retaliation for previous shoot. Bullets will be the true medium of exchange (and change) in such a dystopian future. The NRA and their bought and paid politicians would like that.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.